Truth, lies & propaganda

Ever since I heard the Prime Minister declare in Parliament two weeks ago that Opposition leaders were responsible for migrant workers fleeing the cities during that first absolute and brutal lockdown, I have been seriously troubled. He blamed the Congress for giving ‘free train tickets’ to migrant workers in Mumbai so they could get home, and blamed the Aam Aadmi Party for wandering about the slums of Delhi urging migrant workers to go home. He added that it was because of this that Covid had spread to Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Uttarakhand.

Does the Prime Minister not know what happened? Does he not know that millions of our poorest citizens were forced to walk hundreds of kilometres to their villages because they were made homeless and jobless overnight by his first lockdown? Does he not know that nobody could have been buying train tickets because the trains had stopped along with all other means of public transport? Has he become a victim of his government’s propaganda? Whatever the reason, he would do well to read Barkha Dutt’s new book called To Hell and Back, which recounts in painful detail the stories of the broken people who were forced to walk home carrying with them only their broken dreams.

In Barkha’s words, ‘Cement workers, potato farmers, construction labourers, hotel helps, diamond cutters, blanket weavers, factory supervisors – they walked under the blazing sun and through desolate, dark, moonless nights, sometimes barefoot and sometimes wearing flip-flop slippers made from rubber, their entire universe tied into small sacks carried aloft on their shoulders, holding on to the last packet of glucose biscuits and water before those too ran out’. Barkha should know, she walked with many of them to tell their stories and travelled to remote villages to meet the families of those who died on the way home. It is the fundamental job of journalists to remember what officials choose to forget, and Barkha has done just this.

It is a book that should be compulsory reading for those officials who made policies that dehumanized human beings, instead of protecting them. Indian policemen even in peace time treat our poorest citizens with brutality. During the pandemic it became open season. They seemed to believe they had licence to use maximum force to punish those who violated curfews. The Prime Minister has only once acknowledged that mistakes were made, and this was when he appeared teary-eyed on television after Delta’s ravages to admit that ‘we have lost so many of our own’.

The remorse did not last long. Days later, he went to Varanasi and praised Yogi Adityanath for the efficiency with which he had dealt with the pandemic. The truth is that it was in Uttar Pradesh that we saw bodies floating in the Ganga and saw swathes of shallow graves on its banks because people could not afford to buy wood to cremate their loved ones. When the Chief Minister was asked about this, he lied that it was customary for Hindus to bury their dead along the banks of the Ganga and that all talk of bodies floating in the Ganga was just propaganda.

What troubles me deeply is that it is high officials and spokesmen of the Government of India who have convinced themselves that government propaganda is the truth. Officials who should be charged with criminal negligence for not ordering vaccinations on time now pop up regularly on our TV screens to declare that India has done better than any other country when it comes to vaccinations. There is no question that the Omicron wave was handled better than the earlier two waves, but this does not mean that terrible, avoidable mistakes were not made. These were mistakes that caused untold suffering in our poorest communities, and unless this is acknowledged, we are doomed to repeat these mistakes in the future.

What chance is there of such acknowledgement if the Prime Minister himself chooses to believe that it was Opposition parties who were responsible for the largest mass migration since Partition? Our Opposition leaders are so pathetically enfeebled that they have not managed yet to counter what the Prime Minister said about them in Parliament. How can anyone take seriously the charge that it was these diminished politicians who managed to organise the exodus of millions of migrant workers? Since Modi became PM, the BJP has spent a fortune on creating a massive and highly effective propaganda machine that churns out material for television and the print media at an impressive pace. But when the Prime Minister himself becomes a victim of this propaganda, alarm bells should ring.